Fairy Tale Fridays - The True Bride

With June being the traditional month of weddings, I thought it was only appropriate that Fairy Tale Fridays make its return with tale about a bride and so I selected "The True Bride" from my Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales. As I was reading along, I was enjoying all of the similarities that this tale has with so many of the other tales: wicked stepmother; poor, down-trodden stepdaughter who is forced to work day and night; and even a fairy godmother (although she is not actually called a fairy godmother in this tale).

About half way through this tale, though, the story switched gears. The fairy godmother had seen to it the the wicked stepmother met her demise and that our heroine had been left to thrive in a magnificent castle filled with everything she would need. This is where most fairy tales would end. It is a happily-ever-after ending after all. But this tale launches right into its next incarnation wherein our heroine must find herself a husband. Because, of course, she certainly can't really be happy until she has one, right? There are no end of suitors wooing our young lady but none of them strikes her fancy until a handsome prince comes along. It had to be a handsome prince, didn't it? When our girl promises herself to the prince, he tells her to wait for him under a lime tree and he'll be back shortly after he speaks to his father. When he doesn't return, the girl goes in search of him. Having no luck, she finally buries the fine gowns and jewels she has brought along on her journey and hires herself on as a farm hand. You heard me right, a farm hand. Has a castle she got as a reward after being forced to work so hard for so long that she doesn't return to, opting instead to work hard all day. I don't get it either.

One day, who should ride by but that same prince who does not even recognize the young lady he so recently wanted to marry. The next day he rides by again. Finally the girl decides to dig up her jewels and gowns and go to the castle. Now here is where I started to think to myself "didn't I already read this story?" The first night the girl showed up in a dress with golden suns, the next night a dress with silver moons and the third night a stardress. Well, of course, the prince finally remembered the girl and off they went to her castle to be married. Thanks heavens because everyone knows you have to be married to be happy.

Now, where had I heard this story before? Oh yes, on April 1st Fairy Tale Fridays featured the tale of The Princess in Disguise, a tale where a young woman uses three gowns, one the color of the sun, one the color of the moonlight and one with the twinkle of the stars. It seems that as the tales got told from place to place, different storytellers must have adapted the tales, choosing the parts that they liked from one tale and weaving it into another. I had never heard the story of The True Bride before, but Jim Henson had heard of it and liked it well enough to include it in his mini-series The Storytellers which ran on HBO in the late 1980's. In Henson's version, our heroine has a name (Anja) and rather than a wicked stepmother, she suffers under a troll. The prince is originally a gardener and instead of a series of gowns, Anja must use her jewels and wealth to convince the troll's daughter to let her spend time with the prince who is under sleeping spell. A reverse Sleeping Beauty, if you will. I would love to see if I can find a copy of this entire series! For the version of the tale that Henson must have used, check out the full story, troll and all.

Up next week, more wedding stories including The Heavenly Wedding.

Fairy Tale Fridays - Mother Hulda

This week I was flipping through my copy of Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales and chanced to come upon a drawing that reminded me so much of something you would find in a Shel Silverstein book that I had to read the story it went with.  That story is "Mother Hulda," again a new one for me.  This one seems to have its origins in both German and Norse mythology (hmm...maybe I can tie this one in again on Monday!).  In the Norse mythology it's associated with the Norse goddess, Hel, the queen of the underworld. In the Germanic mythology, she was the goddess of marriage but in German folklore Hulda became a name to denote a single goddess, inclusive of all nature.  In some versions, she lives at the bottom of a well.  Which is where we find her in the Grimm Brothers tale.

There was once a widow who had two daughters.  One was her stepdaughter, who was beautiful and a hard worker.  The other was her own daughter who was ugly and lazy.  Just like in the tale of Cinderella, the stepdaughter was made to work hard.  Every day she was made to sit by a well and spin.  One day she pricked her finger and in trying to wash the blood off in the well, she dropped the spindle in the well.  When she told her stepmother, the woman immediately sent her back to fetch the spindle.  So the girl threw herself down the well after the spindle.  Instead of finding herself at the bottom of the well, she found herself in a beautiful meadow.  She began walking and soon heard some bread calling that it needed to be taken from the oven.  So, taking the baker's peel, she took the loaves out.  Further down the road, she came to an apple tree where the apples called out to her that they needed to shaken from the tree.  So the girl shook the tree until all of the apples had fallen. Soon she came to a small home and saw a woman with great teeth.  She was frightened of the woman and made to leave but the woman called out to her.  "Come and live with me," she called. "Do my housework and shake up my bed thoroughly so that the feathers fly and it snows on the world.'  The girl, no longer afraid, stayed and did everything the woman asked.

After a long while, the girl becomes homesick (why ever in the world, I cannot imagine), and tells the woman she should must go home.  Mother Hulda has been so pleased with her; when she leaves through a door to return home, Mother Hulda drapes the girl in gold.  When she returns to the widow, the widow sees an opportunity for her own daughter.  She sends the ugly girl to spin by the well.  Immediately the girl pricks her finger, throws the spindle down the well, and jumps in after it.  She, too, finds herself in the meadow but being the lazy girl that she is, she won't take the loaves of bread out of the oven and she won't shake the apple tree.  Mother Hulda, however, offers her the same opportunity she offered the stepsister and the girl agrees.  For one day, the girl works hard but soon her laziness begins to show itself.  Mother Hulda says she must be own her way and the girl is happy because she thinks she'll soon be covered with gold.

Mother Hulda has quite a differently plan and as the girl left through the door, she was covered in pitch.  She returned home covered in the stuff and remained that way for the rest of her life.

Fairy Tale Fridays - Rapunzel

This week's fairy tale love story is "Rapunzel."  The story of "Rapunzel" as we are most familiar with it is the Grimm Brothers version.Here's something interesting I found while researching the tale of Rapunzel, however, a side by side comparison of the Grimm Brothers' take on the Rapunzel.  It appears that even the good brothers had multiple versions of the tale!

The Brothers Grimm was adapted their story from "Persinette" which was written in 1698 by Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force (the dauphine of Louis XIV of France).  Another influence on the familiar tale was "Petrosinella" told by Giambattista Basile (yeah, him again). But the origins of "Rapunzel" are much older.  A 10th-century Persian fairy tale, Rudaba, appears to be the original twist on the tale of a woman letting down her hair for access to her tower prison.

Once again we have a fairy tale that opens with a couple wishing for a child.  In their home, there is a small window in back that overlooks a walled garden owned by a witch.  One day as the woman is looking out at the garden she sees some rampion radish (rapunzel) and is overcome with a desire to have some. Eventually her craving becomes so great that she tells her husband she will die without eating some.  So two nights in a row he risks the witch to get his wife some rampion.  But on the second night the witch catches him.  When he tells her why he is there, she allows him to take all he wants in order to keep his wife alive but the cost will be his unborn child (although the version I read doesn't say so, it's clear that the woman's insatiable craving is a result of pregnancy).  The man agrees and when the child is born, the witch takes her and locks her in a tower where there are no stairs or doorways.  To gain access the witch calls to the child, Rapunzel, to lower her hair which the witch scales to reach the top.  One day a prince riding nearby hears Rapunzel singing and is enchanted.  But he can't figure out how to get to her until he happens to see the witch, one night, calling out to Rapunzel.  The next day he does the same thing.  Of course, Rapunzel, who until then had never seen a man, falls in love with him and allows the prince to visit her daily and they devise a plan to help Rapunzel escape.  But just before they are able to effect the escape, Rapunzel lets slip to the witch that the prince has been visiting.  The witch chops off Rapunzel's hair then takes her to a remote desert.  When the prince returns, the witch lowers the Rapunzel's hair.  When the prince reaches the summit, the witch tells him he will never see Rapunzel again but before she can kill him, the prince leaps from the tower.  He survives but has landed in thorns which blind him, fulfilling the witch's prophecy.  Despondent, the prince wanders then land until one day he stumbles upon Rapunzel.  Recognizing him, she cries because of what has happened to him.  Miraculously, her tears heal his eyes and the couple...and their child...return to the prince's kingdom.

Fairy Tale Fridays - Cinderella

In honor of this being the month of love, I thought it was only appropriate that we look at some of the princess fairy tales in February.  Kicking it off is the tale of Cinderella.  There are thousands of versions of the tale of Cinderella from countries all over the world as from as far back as 100 B.C.

One of the earliest versions to incorporate the wicked stepmother, stepsisters, slipper and hunt by the king for the owner of the slipper was written in 1634 by Giambattista Basile, an Italian. But it was Charles Perrault who introduced the elements of the fairy godmother, the pumpkin and the glass slipper in 1697.

 In the 19th century, the Brothers Grimm recorded the German version of the tale which is called Aschenputtel.  In this version, there is no fairy godmother.  Cinderella receives help from a tree growing on her mother's grave.  The wicked step-sisters do much more than just try to squeeze their feet into the slipper; they each cut off a portion of their foot to make it fit.  And the retribution for their meanness to Cinderella in this version?  Not her forgiveness and generosity, which they find in the Perrault version.  In true Grimm Brother's fashion, pigeons pluck their eyes out.

I found the Perrault version of this tale on a new-to-me site called SurLaLune Fairy Tales.  This is the version that Disney adapted, although they did include the birds that help Cinderella in the German version.  Of course they did; they're Disney and there always have to be helpful animals.  Except that, not surprisingly, the animals in the Brothers Grimm tale do not talk and sing. In Perrault's hands, the stepsisters are ugly and Cinderella's father was a doormat for her stepmother and allowed his daughter to be treated like a servant.  No wonder she was so eager to rush off and marry a man she hardly knew who seemed to only love her for her looks.

 In the Grimm Brothers version of the tale, beauty inside doesn't equate to beauty inside; the stepsisters are also beautiful on the outside.  But once again, Cinderella's father seems to have forgotten that the third girl in the house is his own flesh and blood.  I was happy to see the my Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales included a version of this story that had not been sanitized.  When the slipper doesn't fit the first stepsister, the stepmother hands her a knife, telling her to cut off her toe, which she does, making the slipper fit.  Off she rides to be wed to the prince but singing birds betray her secret.  The second stepsister then tries on the slipper and is convinced by her own mother to cut off part of her heel to make the slipper fit. She, too, is betrayed by a bird.  At the wedding procession of the Prince and Cinderella, the stepsisters, wishing to curry favor, walk alongside the carriage but pigeons deliver their just reward by plucking out their eyes.

In My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, Stacey Richter uses the basic premise of the Cinderella story (girl is saved by boy) in a modern setting where being swept off your feet by a man is not necessarily a good thing.  In A Case Study of Emergency Room Procedure and Risk Management by Hospital Staff Members in the Urban Facility, our young heroine was actually kidnapped by Prince, a meth making, hog riding, gang member who turns his Princess into the premier meth maker in the area as well as an addict.  The story is written in the style of an actual case study, citing notes and records from Princess' time spent in rehab.  It's an unusual way to tell a story but it works well, probably because it was inspired by actual research into methamphetamine conducted while Richter was also contemplating a fairy tale she was writing for a friend.  Lesson to all of the young girls out there: boys are bad!

Fairy Tale Fridays - The Bremen Town Musicians

Once again I'm returning to the stories of the Brothers Grimm this week with the tale of The Bremen Town Musicians.  In this tale, a donkey, who has gotten too old to be of use to his master any longer decides he needs to strike out on his own before his master cuts him loose.  He decides to head to Bremen where he hopes to be a town musician.  Along the way he comes across a a dog, a cat and a rooster all of whom have also outlived their perceived usefulness.  The quartet agree to travel together, hoping to all become musicians.  Along the way, they stop to spend the night under a tree.  But when the rooster spots a house and they all decide they'd prefer to stay there.  When they look in the window, they see a group of thieves enjoying a fine feast and decide they'd like to be there.  Working together they crash through the window scaring the thieves away.  Later that night, one of the thieves returns.  Startling the animals, the thief is attacked by each of the animals in turn but never really sees what he has been attacked by.  When he returns to the rest of his band, he tells them he has been attacked by a "gruesome witch, and I felt her breath and her long nails in my face [the cat]; and by the door there stands a man who stabbed me in the leg with a knife [the dog]; and in the yard there lies a black specter, who beat me with his wooden club [the donkey]; and above, upon the roof, there sits the justice, who cried, "bring that rogue here!" [the rooster].  Needless to say, the thieves never returned and the animals enjoyed the house so much that they never went on to Bremen.

So many fairy tales are little more than stories but this one clearly has a lesson, one that, with our aging population, is more important that ever.  While those around them felt that these animals were too old to be of any use, they decide to head for Bremen, which was known for its freedom. They knew they still had value.  And their ability to take care of themselves against the thieves, proves that.

I paired the Brothers Grimm version of this story with Joyelle McSweeney's play The Warm Mouth (from My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me).  McSweeney takes the structure of The Bremen Town Musicians and uses it to "take up the problem of shelter, including the body as a king of failed shelter."  McSweeney populates her play with characters that reflect their setting in the Michiana area of Indiana that includes the town of Bremen.  When I tell you that the figures in this play include road kill, a starving boy, a murdered girl and a shot up dog you'll get a good idea of how much darker this modern fairy tale is than those to which we are accustomed.  A word of caution to the squeamish, this tale is very gritty and very raw as you might imagine.

Fairy Tale Fridays - The Juniper Tree

Back in September, when I told you that the book My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me had arrived on my door step, I explained that the title of the book came from the Grimm Brothers fairy tale "The Juniper Tree."  I had actually forgotten that when I chose that story for this week's Fairy Tale Fridays, so I was excited when I started reading the story as told in "Grimms Complete Fairy Tales."

In The Juniper Tree, a man's first wife pricks her finger below a juniper tree. When she sees the blood drop into the snow, she wishes for a child as red as blood and as white as snow.  Nine months later she gives birth to a son but is so overcome with joy that she dies.  Her husband then buries her under the tree.

Years later, the man has remarried and he and his new wife have a daughter.  The woman dearly loves her daughter but hates her step-son and abuses him regularly.  One day as he reaches for an apple she has offered him from a large chest, she drops the lid on his neck.  When she realizes that the lid has chopped off the boy's head, she scrambles for a way to hide her guilt.  Using a handkerchief to hide the wound, she places his head back on his neck and sets him outside of the house with an apple in his hand.  His sister, seeing the apple asks him for it but gets no response.  Her mother tells her to ask him again and if she gets no response to give him a box on the ear.  Of course she gets no response and is alarmed when his head falls off.  Her mother tells her that to protect the daughter they must hide what she has done.  Her solution?  She cooks up the son into a meal that she then serves her husband who loves it so much it gobbles it all up.  The daughter, who loved her brother, takes his bones and buries them under the juniper tree.  Shortly the tree parts, and amidst a cloud and fire, a bird flies up from the tree.

The bird flies off and begins singing a song in a nearby village which is so lovely that people are willing to give the bird things to hear the song again.  Once the bird has the things he wants, he flies back to the house and lands in the tree and begins singing.  The father goes out to hear the bird and the bird drops a gold necklace over his head.  When the sister also goes out to listen, the bird drops a pair of red shoes for her. But when the stepmother finally dares to come outside, the bird drops a millstone on her head and crushes her.  Then there was another cloud, another fire, and the bird disappeared and the boy reappeared.

And just what was the song that so entranced everyone?

"It was my mother who murdered me;

It was my father who ate of me;

It was my sister Marjory

Who all my bones in pieces found;

Them in a handkerchief she bound,

And laid them under the juniper tree.

Kywitt, kywitt, kywitt, I cry,

Oh what a beautiful bird am I!"

To pair with the original telling, I read Alissa Nuttings adaptation "The Brother and The Bird" from My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me.  Nutting stays very true to the original story but give it a fresh slant. In her take, Nutting makes the stepmother a cleaning fanatic who skulks around and whispers, frightening even her own daughter.  The father loves his children but is "aloof" and clearly still obsessed with his first wife.

This time the mother kills her stepson by smothering him with a pillow and a Bible.  Seeing that he has died, she forces her daughter to help her chop up his body, package up the pieces and put the body into the deep freeze.  Then she begins serving her husband sauerbraten made with his body, meals that her husband loves.  The daughter is so appalled that she sneaks the rest of her brother's body out and begins to bury it under the juniper tree.  Again the tree magically transforms the body.

This time the daughter begins hearing flapping noises that soon begin to be heard on the radio as the family listens at night followed by Nutting's take on the song above.  This eventually drives the mother insane.  When the son returns in his new state, the stepmother runs out to chop down the tree and try to kill him again.  But the tree takes its revenge and the son is returned to life.

Nutting says that in her retelling she wanted to "retain not only the father's ignorance but also the original source of hope for the murdered brother, his sister..."  She was fascinated by the Grimm Brothers tale as a child and still finds the story relevant.

This tale has everything I love in a fairy tale, a wonderful beginning (in the Brothers Grimm version the story started "A long, long time ago..."), a wicked stepmother (who not only kills her stepson, but also feeds him to his father and implicates her daughter in his death), and an ending where the bad person gets hers but even then the ending is not altogether happy. 

Fairy Tale Fridays - Snow White, Rose Red

A few weeks ago I mentioned that one of my favorite Grimm Brothers fairy tales is Snow White and Rose Red.  I was excited to find that Lydia Millet had written a new take on that beloved tale for the compilation My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, titled Snow White, Rose Red.

Millet launches the story with much of the same detail as the original tale.  The two girls have essentially the same names, they are staying in a "cabin" in the woods and they are both very good people.  Except in Millet's hands, these are two very rich little girls whose mother is a former Russian ballerina with an eating disorder and mental challenges and whose father is a businessman with almost no time for them.  The "bear" turns out to be a man who is hiding from his soon to be ex-wife who comes across them in their yard one day.  Just as they do in the original tale, the girls befriend their bear.  But in this version there is no angry dwarf that must be slain, it is the girls' own father who has to be dealt with.

Just as it can be hard to adapt a beloved book into a movie, it's a risk to take the well-known fairy tales and give them a new spin. I found that Millet had managed to kept just the right elements from the fairy tale I love and created a truly original spin that I very much enjoyed!

Millet says that she was inspired to write the story after developing a fondness for landscapes and nature.  Finding herself interested in the forests of the Adirondacks made her think of all of the fairy tales set in forests and from there it was only a short leap to this tale.

Fairy Tale Fridays - Can You Tell A Fairy Tale By The Ending?

As I've begun reading fairy tales, I'm trying to read with an eye toward what things they might have in common, perhaps a moral to the story.  This week I began reading from Grimms Complete Fairy Tales, the compilation that my son and his girlfriend gave me for Christmas.

I started with the first story in the book, not because it was the first story but because it was The Frog Prince" and I collect frogs. When a princess agrees to become a friend to a frog if he will rescue her beloved golden ball, she doesn't think there will be any way for him to follow her and hold her to her promise. But eventually he does make his way to the castle.  When the princess confides to the King why the frog is there, the King insists that the princess make good on her promise.  He forces her to let the frog up onto the table and to share her dinner.  But when she is forced to take the frog up to her bedroom, she is repulsed by the idea of sleeping with the frog and throws him at the wall.  Before he hits the wall, though, he turns into a prince and then marries the princess.  What?  He marries the girl who broke her promise, whined about keeping it and then tried to injure him?  Okay, I know some cases where this really has happened but I don't think of that as much of a moral.

Some of the stories don't even seem to have endings.  For example, The Golden Key tells the story of a poor boy who discovers a key and an iron chest.  After much trouble, he finds the lock, fits the key in and turns it and then..."we must wait until he is quite unlocked it...and then we shall learn what wonderful things were lying in that box."  Except we don't.  That is the ending of the story.  In The Old Beggar Woman an old beggar woman (surprise!) who is always exceedingly grateful for any kindness shown her, gets too near a blaze and her skirt catches on fire.  The "friendly rogue of a boy" who invited her to join him by the fire could not find any water but still might have "wept all the water in his body out of his eyes" to put her out.  But the story ends without the reader knowing whether or not he did that.

Just when I began to believe that there really were no morals to the stories, I read Sharing The Joy and The Sorrow, about a man who abused his wife but was punished by the magistrates, and The Nail, about a man who was in such a hurry to get somewhere that he didn't put a nail in his horse's shoe which eventually caused the horse to go lame and his leg to break causing the man to be very late.

The funniest story I read this week was Fair Katrinelje and Pif-Paf-Poltrie.  A young man is made to ask permission of an entire family before he will be allowed to marry the youngest daughter.  After he has gotten all of the permissions, he asks her about her dowry.  She has almost none but that's okay because he has almost nothing to offer in return.

Sunday Salon - January 2

Happy New Year!  I hope you were all able to usher in the new year in the perfect way for you.  We spent a lovely evening with friends at their home--good eats, good drinks, embarrassingly bad showing at Beatles Trivial Pursuit.

I was all done signing up for challenges for this year.  Absolutely done.  Was not going to even look at A Novel Challenge.  So, of course, you know I did.  Where I found about about the 2011 Fairy Tale Challenge, hosted by Tif of Tif Talks Books.  How in the world was I going to pass that one up?  Since I'm already reading fairy tales for my weekly Fairy Tale Fridays feature, this one should be no problem so I'm signing up for the Happily Ever After level which means I need to read 12 things.  There are several other challenges I'm keeping my eye on--I may yet have to sign up for them.  But I'll see where I'm at in a couple of weeks before I commit.

Couldn't wait for the Bloggiesta being held in three weeks; I had to do some work in my Google Reader this weekend.  I haven't been able to keep up with the number of new posts in my reader for the past couple of months and there were several blogs on my list that haven't posted anything in many months.  Hopefully I haven't deleted any of you--if I did, please shoot me a comment so I can add you back on the list!  Also, I did something I've never done before.  I gave myself a set amount of time to read posts today and when the time was up, I marked the rest as read.  Need to start the new year with a clean slate!

I got a Christmas present this week from my son and his girlfriend.  They gave me Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales with gorgeous illustrations from Arthur Rackham.  You'll be hearing much more about this book on Fairy Tale Fridays. There are tales in this book that are new to me.  Have you ever heard of one titled "Fred and Kate?"  

What's on your reading agenda for this week?